BIG WHITE.....come out of the closet!

For someone that loves color, lots of it…..it will be quite a surprise to see no color in the photos.  That’s because it’s about hand quilting, more specifically about hand quilting what friends heard me to refer to as “BIG WHITE” for years, roughly 7 if I’m truly honest about it.  Seven being the years it took me to complete, mentally running away from it each stitch I added.

BIG WHITE became my quilting nemesis.  I don’t recall a more painful quilting project.  Nothing gave me more angst than this did.  So how did it start, and why?

Quite early in my quilting career I became fascinated by the beautiful whole cloth quilt movement.  You know, white/off white solid background, printed design that washes out after hand quilting the entire motif in white.  Completed these beauties were exceptional.  The tiny stitches gave the entire surface it’s personality.  I was drawn to these miracles of needle and thread like a bee to a hive, or in my case like a mosquito to a high voltage bug zapper.

I started hand quilting with an enormous amount of enthusiasm.  About a quarter finished I couldn’t stand to look at it.  Oh, my stitching was just fine.  It took me quite a long time to figure out why I felt such disdain for this quilt.  I actually got to the point where I hoped I’d ‘accidentally’ spill water on it so the design went away.  I couldn’t finish it without the printed design now could I?  Any of you that remember this agonizing period in my life are sitting there laughing!

Weeks turned into months, then into years.  I’d ignore it in storage.  Maybe someone would find it after I’m in the big quilt studio in the sky.  Then it hit me like a ton of bricks…..I hated this quilt because it was, well……vanilla.  Don’t get me wrong, I love vanilla.  But as I started to say, for someone that loves colors, lots of it, I couldn’t stand working in the whiteness of this quilt.

But one thing kept nagging at me.  I really didn’t care if I ever finished it.  And that bothered me more than it being all white.  One day fed up with my attitude I pulled it from the bottom of the closet, and little by little I finished the hand quilting and added the binding.  It went through the wash cycle to remove the remaining faint blue lines.  It was folded and put in my quilt cupboard, never to see the light of day.  Years later it was finished, never shown or talked about, or given its proper due.  I was still running from it.

Then last night I watched PBS FINDING YOUR ROOTS featuring Sting’s quest for ancestry.  I love this show!  Anyway, Sting grew up in the massive shipyards in Liverpool, England.  He told how everyone hated the noisy and dangerous environment of red lead and asbestos.  He ran from it but most stayed.  But why?  “We could point to them (the ships) and say ‘we built them’.  It was a very unpleasant place to work yet there was an immense pride in it.  Today society sits all day at a computer, so where is the artifact that says we worked…. the ships were a massive example of that.” Sting said.

I ran from BIG WHITE like he did the ship yards.  Today I'm at least sharing my sense of pride in  finishing it.  Besides, this blog is about craft.  And that’s what this quilt is…….a hand crafted, tangible result of many years labor.  BIG WHITE…..take a bow!